In a study of the use of grammatical morphemes by 10 hearing-impaired children (5-15 years old) and 10 normal-hearing children matched on the basis of mean length of utterance, results revealed no significant differences in correct grammatical morphemes used and identical order of acquisition for both groups. (Author/CL)

Analysis of spontaneous language samples of eight children (4-11 years old) diagnosed with developmental verbal apraxia (motor speech disorder) revealed that at least some of the errors could not be attributed to motor speech and/or phonologic limitations but rather indicated concomitant syntactic disorders. (Author/CL)

Reanalyzes production data from three French children to make two basic points. Shows that tense and agreement inflection follow independent courses of acquisition (in child French). Using a mechanism of grammatical development based on partial rankings of constraints, analysis successfully models over three stages the frequency with which…

Three experiments presented nonsense verbs to two-year-olds either in syntactic isolation or embedded within a transitive syntactic frame. Found that children had identifiable action biases in the absence of syntactic information and that these biases were shifted by the addition of a transitive syntactic frame. (MDM)

Three studies examined the role of ontological and syntactic information in children's learning of words for physical entities, such as objects and substances. Results reveal a strong and changing developmental interaction for the use of ontologically relevant perceptual information, labels, and syntax. (Author/VWL)

Provides evidence from child language acquisition and comparative syntax for existence of a syntactic parameter in the classical sense of Chomsky (1981), with simultaneous effects on syntactic argument structure. Implications are that syntax is subject to points of substantive parametric variation as envisioned in Chomsky, and the time course of…

Previous studies have shown a correlation between working memory (WM) and syntactic complexity (variously defined) in language comprehension. The present study investigates this relationship in spontaneous language production, proposing a novel metric, informed by language development and disorders, where complexity is construed in terms of those…

Language is a fantastic gift: it empowers humans to create new ways of speaking with, for and to others about any topic or experience. Language is a rule-governed, meaningful communication system. It is a symbol system, where a word or phrase stands for or represents something else that can be touched, thought about, seen, heard, felt, done,…

Background: Previous studies of outcome for children with early language delay have focused on measures of early language as predictors of language outcome. This study investigates whether very early processing skills (VEPS) known to underpin language development will be better predictors of specific language and social communication outcomes than…

The performance of Icelandic-speaking children on the comprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender was investigated. Eighty children ranging in age from 4-8 years were tested. It was hypothesized that if children rely primarily on formal information for determing grammatical gender, they should perform equally well on both natural and syntactic…

Children from 18-30 months who spoke in either one-or two-word utterances were tested for their ability to discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Results showed that these children can discriminate. (ST)

Concerns the language development of four children between the ages of 19 and 26 months, as they progressed from single-word utterances to a mean length of utterance of 2.5 morphemes. The observed developmental sequence is described and possible linguistic and cognitive explanations for it are discussed.

IN THIS ARTICLE THE AUTHOR GIVES AN OVERVIEW OF DEVELOPMENTS IN THE FIELD OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS DURING THE PERIOD FOLLOWING THE PUBLICATION OF VOLUME 34, NUMBER 2 OF "REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH" IN APRIL 1964. DISCUSSED ARE (1) LEARNING AND NATIVISTIC THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, (2) EMPIRICAL FINDINGS IN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS,…

This study examined the feasibility of one method of investigating the development of children's implicit awareness of syntactic patterns. An enriched version of the free association format was used to test 32 subjects. The principal variables of interest were the subject's grade level, and the syntactic pattern and meaningfulness of the semantic…